And there we are, the KDE team has released KDE Software Compilation 4.4, formerly known as, well, KDE. Major new features include social networking and online collaboration integration, the new netbook interface, the KAuth authentication framework, and a lot more.

"X is bad!" has become a talking-point for the local Linux Hater's Club. It's not a substantive claim. X has gotten O.K., and it's still improving. Soon, it will be good; eventually, it will be freaking awesome. It's certainly not Desktop Linux's constraining factor.

Funny I could just as easily say that "X has gotten better and will soon be awesome!" has been a talking-point for the local Linux Desktop Defender's Club.

I agree that it isn't the weakest link in the Linux desktop. I'd say that dependency issues cause more problems for people. Sub-pixel font rendering also needs to be improved.

The biggest thing holding Linux back from the desktop, I suspect, is just that there's no need for it.

At the very least there is a need on portable devices, and there are a lot of old computers in the third world that need to be upgraded from their pirated copies of XP. However in developed countries it is hard for me to recommend it even for a basic browsing pc. It's getting there but I still wouldn't put it on a relative's computer out of fear that I would get a call over an update breaking something.

Funny I could just as easily say that "X has gotten better and will soon be awesome!" has been a talking-point for the local Linux Desktop Defender's Club.

Fair enough. In any case, the original statement was... far from original. One might say, we've covered this territory on OS News. Exhaustively.

I agree that it isn't the weakest link in the Linux desktop. I'd say that dependency issues cause more problems for people. Sub-pixel font rendering also needs to be improved.

If you're trying to install things from source, sure. But if you stick to your distributor's repositories, you'll probably be fine. I haven't had dependancy resolution problems in a long while, on Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu. Or Slackware, for that matter, as it pretty much just installs everything you'd want in the first place. (I have on RHEL4, but it's... very old.)

Dependancy resolution seems like a consistent gripe of yours; I'm a littel curious about what actually happened to get you so convinced that it's such a pressing problem.

Also, my fonts look fine, and have since forever on pretty much any Linux and any hardware I've used. But I'm not a typographer, so as long as they're legible and not highly aliased, I'm O.K. with them.

If you're trying to install things from source, sure. But if you stick to your distributor's repositories, you'll probably be fine.

Probably isn't good enough and users shouldn't have to wait for a repository update just to run the latest version of a browser. It's also a complete waste of labor hunting down dependency bugs.

Dependancy resolution seems like a consistent gripe of yours; I'm a littel curious about what actually happened to get you so convinced that it's such a pressing problem.

I think it's an archaic system that causes needless problems. Shared libraries made more sense in the 70's when hardware resources were severely limited.

Also, my fonts look fine, and have since forever on pretty much any Linux and any hardware I've used. But I'm not a typographer, so as long as they're legible and not highly aliased, I'm O.K. with them.

Well I don't like the sub-pixel rendering in Linux and I'm not the only one. It isn't simply that I'm used to Windows either. I find the font rendering in the iphone to be easier on the eyes as well.